CHAPTER X
AT AVENUE LODGE
On the night of the dinner-party, and when the last guest was gone, Lady Starkie took her brother by both hands, and openly congratulated him in front of Daintree and Claire.
“A perfect triumph!” she warmly declared. “I only wish the enemy had been here to see; but there, Nicholas, you need bother your head no more about them! You know now the feeling of your friends; rest assured that it is the feeling also of all sensible persons throughout the community. Everybody knows that the charge against you was neither more nor less than an odious Radical conspiracy; they know it themselves, and have let it drop like a hot coal, you mark my words! Think no more of it, my dear Nicholas. It has done you more good than harm. They know that too, and will never be such fools as to rake it up again.”
Mr. Harding received these well-meant assurances with forced laughter and a twitching face; they were supplemented by a duly florid little speech from Daintree, who had rejoined the gentlemen after all, and was now a brighter man. But his eyes still followed Claire, and his soul was in his eyes, as always when she was by. She was now shutting her piano, and putting away music with a white face which she feared to show.
“I ought to return thanks to you both, upon my word I ought,” cried Mr. Harding, with the falsest note yet in his noisy laugh. “But the fact is”—with a sudden pallid candour—“I’ve been waiting all the evening for that fellow Blaydes. I can’t conceive what has happened to him!”
Claire let the open top of the grand piano slip through her fingers with a resounding bang. Daintree watched her with a new expression, lost, however, upon the other two, who had glanced towards her themselves. Claire apologised for her clumsiness without turning round.
“Was it on—business—that you wished to see Captain Blaydes?” inquired Lady Starkie, with eyebrows a little raised.
“Partly; a rather important matter.”
“A very awkward time!”
“That couldn’t be helped; the point is, what has happened to him? The coach was due in hours ago; we have had excellent weather; the roads must be excellent too. Then what has kept him away? I cannot think! I cannot think!” cried Mr. Harding, as at last his alarm broke bounds, and rattled in his voice as plainly as it twitched upon his face. “Not for the life of me,” he added; “but, upon my word, I’ve a good mind to walk straight over to his rooms—”
“Oh, do! do! for pity’s sake—now, at once!” And there was Claire, trembling before them, with lifted hands and broken voice; her pale face luminous with the white light of a breathless anxiety, an excruciating fear. So for an instant stood father and daughter, dumbly regarding each other, and half in surprise; for the emotion of each was expressed in the look of the other.
Then Claire broke down and fled, sobbing, from the room.
Lady Starkie followed her.
“Now I know,” said Daintree. “Now I know!”
Mr. Harding shut the door. “I’m glad to hear it,” said he, sardonically. “I confess myself puzzled. What is your interpretation?”
“She is in love with Blaydes!”
“Blaydes? Nonsense; you mean yourself; it’s you if anybody.”
Daintree told the story of his declaration in the arbour. He told it in gasps, with sudden beads upon his face. “But I’ll have her yet!” he finished through his teeth.
Mr. Harding’s indignation scarcely met the case. The match would have been of his making. He had given much more than his consent to Daintree’s suit, and for some time past had regarded him as a certain son-in-law. Indignant he was, but more puzzled, and most distrait. After a little wild speaking in his daughter’s name, he suddenly said—
“But, look here, if your notion is correct, that’s all the more reason why I should see this fellow Blaydes at once. I couldn’t think why the beggar migrated to West End; now I can; and I shall forbid him my house this very night. There’s a little transaction between us that shall be settled, and then I wash my hands of him. Will you come? It’s only about a mile along the road. And I must know whether the fellow got back to town to-night, and if so, why on earth I haven’t seen him. I must know that before I sleep!”
Daintree got his hat with alacrity, and together the gentlemen let themselves quietly out by the front door; nevertheless Claire heard them in her room, though her aunt, who was still with her, did not.
They walked between the same budding hedgerows and moonlit fields which Tom Erichsen and the wretched Blaydes had looked on earlier in the night. They passed within two hundred paces of the spot where the Captain’s body was even then lying dead and undiscovered. They woke a sleeping hamlet, and were sharply informed through an angrily opened window that Captain Blaydes had come home, but had dressed and left again in a hackney-coach, shortly after ten.
“Did he say where he was going?”
“No; but I heard him tell the coachman it was only a mile.”
The window was shut down. The pair returned. They had spoken little on their way to West End; not one word did they exchange on the way back; but Nicholas Harding shook a little at the knees, and his companion watched him shrewdly.
As they pushed open the gate, a light vanished from an upper window, to reappear in the hall. Daintree took the other by the arm, and whispered, “That’s Miss Harding! Now you will see if I was wrong.”
And, indeed, the door was open before they reached it, and Claire on the step, candle in hand, the tallow streaming in the draught, and dashing unheeded against the pink crape and the white satin which she had never taken off. Her face looked grey and old, with young eyes burning out of place.
“Well?”
Even the monosyllable was scarcely articulate.
“He is not there,” said Mr. Harding.
“He never came back to London!”
“Yes —he did. That’s just the point. He started to come to us about ten o’clock, and has never been heard of since.”
Claire stood mute before them, her face pale as ashes in the light of the candle, which she carried quite steadily now. She had trembled in her fear; she stood like a statue in its realisation; then, with a single moan, she turned away, and her candle passed steadily through the hall, and slowly and steadily up the stairs.
Mr. Harding seemed lost in his own reflections, when Daintree clutched him by the arm.
“What did I tell you as we came up to the house?”
Harding thought a little. “You said it was Blaydes. Well, if so, she shall never have him. But I only wish I knew where he was!”
“So do I,” said Daintree, viciously; and he held out his hand as they entered the hall; but Mr. Harding would not hear of his going to bed.
“For pity’s sake don’t desert me yet! There is no sleep for me this night. What can have happened to the fellow—between West End and this? What can have happened?”
“I neither know nor care.”
“Nor I—nor I—but a man can’t help his forebodings!”
And Harding shuddered as he shut the library door, and lit the fire with his own hands, though the night was so warm; and cowered over it till daylight, a ghostly satire on the loud, flamboyant, cocksure head of last night’s dinner-table.
The eye of the guest was on him till it dropped with weariness; and at sunrise they both retired.
Claire in her room had never closed an eye. She did not come down to breakfast, and her aunt presided in her stead.
Lady Starkie thought her brother and his guest a pair of wrecks, and did not wonder at it when they told her to what hour they had sat up. But that was all they did tell her; and the lieutenant-general’s widow departed for Bath in the forenoon, little dreaming what a storm was to burst within the hour.
When she was gone Mr. Harding ordered his coach for another expedition to West End. Daintree again accompanied him, and looking back as they drove away, saw a white face vanish from the window whence the light had disappeared on their return from the earlier pilgrimage overnight. He gnashed his teeth, but said nothing; and they drove on in a common preoccupation.
The fields were dazzling green in the sweet, hot sunshine; the hedgerows sparkled with a million emeralds; and up the hill to the right, beneath a row of horse-chestnuts clouded over with young leaves, the white trousers and shiny hats of a body of police caught without riveting Mr. Harding’s roving eye. The sun shone brilliantly upon the cool green spot where they stood; but yet another constable, with a tall companion in plain clothes, was descending the right-of-way, and reached the road-side stile as the coach passed.
“There seems to be something astir there,” observed Daintree, pointing to the group up above.
Mr. Harding glanced in the direction indicated, and then sat looking straight in front of him until the red roofs of West End rose above the hedge to the left.
At the cottage where Blaydes had lodged nothing had been heard as yet. The good wife was strenuously civil, as if to make up for any asperity in the night; but the gentlemen learned no more now than then. As they turned away, however, the wicket clicked, and they stood face to face with a police-officer and a dingy, tall civilian.
“The men we saw just now!” cried Daintree, as Nicholas Harding clutched his arm. “Do you know anything of Captain Blaydes, my man?”
“Was you looking for him?”
“Yes, we were; or, rather, this gentleman was.”
“Then you’ll never find him, sir, in this world.”
“What?” shrieked Harding; and he was more shaken by the truth than even the dead man’s landlady, who brought a chair from the kitchen, upon which Mr. Harding sat shaking in the sun, with his full-blooded face turned to purple, and the great jaw sunk upon his stock.
“He was a friend of my friend,” explained Daintree, below his breath; but Harding heard.
“A friend?” said he. “Heaven knows about that; but I expected him at my house last night—expected him every hour!”
The personage in plain clothes declared himself a detective from Scotland Yard, and told the landlady that he should require a few words with her alone. The pair then withdrew into the house; but the policeman remained outside, and sold his tongue for half a guinea. The two gentlemen thus learnt before mid-day all that appeared in that evening’s papers, with one addition and one exception. The addition was a confident assurance that the police were on the perpetrator’s track already. The exception was merely a description of the dead man’s stolen property, which was then being obtained within.
“Now, in such cases,” said Mr. Harding, feeling for another coin, “what is done with the dead man’s papers?”
“Well, first you’ve got to find ’em,” replied the constable, with a grin.
“But in this case you have obviously found something; or how would you know who he was?”
“We found no papers, however.”
“No papers!”
“Not a scrap; but his linen was marked; and then we knew all about our gentleman. I’m sorry to say we’ve known all about him for some time. It was only the shocking state his head—”
“That will do,” said Daintree, bending over Mr. Harding’s chair. “You are ill, sir,” he whispered. “Let me take you home at once.”
Harding yielded, and tottered to his carriage, muttering, “I waited for him hour after hour; and this was why; and this was why!”
Claire was still upstairs on their return, and Mr. Harding nerved himself with a glass of brandy before going to her with the news. But it shook her less than it had shaken him. Her first question was the last to be expected by one as completely in the dark as Nicholas Harding. She wanted to know with what kind of weapon the crime had been committed. He told her (what the constable had told him) with a heavy ash stick, whereupon she nodded singularly, as much as to say that was what she expected. In fact she had divined the worst from the very beginning. But her apathy blinded him to everything else: he asked her how she could faint at a vague fear, and yet hear the terrible truth unmoved.
“You will know soon enough,” was Claire’s reply.
“But you seemed in such a state about poor Blaydes?”
“I was.”
“I made sure he must be the one you cared for.”
“He? Poor fellow! Never for an instant.”
“Then who is it, Claire? Daintree has told me the answer you were foolish enough to give him; and now I insist on knowing who it is!”
“You must not insist now; you will know soon enough,” said she again. And not another word.
Mr. Harding was nonplussed; there was some new mystery here, and until he should find its key he decided to discuss Claire no further with the suitor on whose success his heart was still set. Indeed, he saw little more of Daintree that day, but drove into the City after luncheon, and was not back for dinner. Hearing this, Claire dressed hastily, and braved the guest across a solemn board, protected from familiar converse by the continual presence of a man-servant behind either chair. Yet Daintree could not avoid the tragic topic.
“I fancy that Mr. Harding must be making inquiries at headquarters,” said he. “Have you seen an evening paper?”
“No.”
“I have the Globe. It gives a pretty full account.”
“Do they know who did it?”
“Not yet.”
“Not his name?”
“No.”
“Nor his appearance? Nor anything at all about him?”
“No, absolutely nothing as yet; but it is only a question of time.”
Claire sat without eating a bite, while her fixed eyes slowly filled. “Poor fellow— poor fellow—poor fellow!” she suddenly cried out. “I cannot believe—” and as suddenly she curbed her tongue.
“Well, what?” said her companion.
“That—he—is dead!”
Daintree darkened.
“So you were thinking of Blaydes!” he said bitterly. “I might have known—I might have known!”